The Berardo Collection

This duo of Portuguese artists was born in Madeira. Diamantino Jesus (b. 1969)studied planning and design at Madeira University and took a course in the restoration of sacred art in Pamplona. He has featured in joint and individual exhibitions in the Madeira Region since the 1990s and has also done restoration and design work. Zé Diogo (b. 1966) has a degree in chemical engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, although he has devoted himself to painting and has exhibited his work all over Madeira. In 2003, they got together for an art project entitled DDiArte and ever since have worked on artistically manipulated digital photography, which has been duly recognised by awards and commissions. In the same year, they won the Gaudí bronze medal in the V International Biennial of Photography XLV Gaudí Medal and their work Sonho de Verão (2003) remained on show in Catalonia. Also in 2003, the work Liberdade do Telefone Fixo (2003) won the PHOTO/CEGETEL award in Paris. In 2004, Hanged (2003) and Varanda I (2003) were entered in the largest international photography competition and were published in the French magazine PHOTO. In the same year, they had a travelling exhibition that went to the main Caja de España branches in Spain and a joint exhibition entitled O Corpo em Movimento (The Body in Movement) at Museu da Electricidade, Casa da Luz, in Madeira. In 2005, they won the gold and bronze Gaudí medals at the VI International Biennial of Photography XLV Gaudí Medal. In 2006, they were in a collective exhibition, Sem Qualidade (Without Quality) at the café Fora d’Oras in Madeira and put on an individual exhibition Miragens Perversas (Perverse Mirages) at the head office of the winemakers, Bacalhôa Vinhos de Portugal, in Azeitão. The human body is these two artists’ favourite, recurring theme, as an excellent way of exhibiting the aesthetic phenomenon. DDiArte use the human body as a vehicle for conveying their more or less critical messages about society, sometimes sarcastic and satirical, dreamlike and mythological, through subversive reality games. The body is shown in a hedonistic, sometimes narcissistic, lifeless form but one in which the classic canons of beauty and proportion are idolatrised and the “celebration of the muses” and of sensuality are displayed in a photographic language full of hyperrealist details.